Fever Dream

The canon of writing on Los Angeles architecture has probably done as much to elevate the city’s design profile as the built work itself, proselytizing narratives of sun-and-sea residential lifestyles or property-and-privilege real estate economies to the traditional centers of architectural discourse back east. The major titles will likely be familiar to almost any architecture aficionado: Esther McCoy’s Five California Architects circa 1960, Reyner Banham’s The Architecture of Four Ecologies from 1971, and Mike Davis’s 1990 City of Quartz have variously cast Angeleno building design and urbanism as the city’s defining protagonists and antagonists. In words and in mortar, modernism was enshrined as the lingua franca of local architecture.

Charles Jencks’s Daydream Houses of Los Angeles never figures on the must-read lists that recommend all the above—a shame, really, since it has proved at least as prescient as any of these more established architectural scriptures in the 40-…